https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/russiagate-obama-iran

On Feb. 9, Entous finally got his chance to publish the leaked intercept of the Kislyak call. He and Washington Post colleagues Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima found nine current and former U.S. officials to confirm that Flynn had discussed sanctions with the Russian. It went unremarked that the article provided evidence of yet another leak of Flynn’s name from a classified intercept, and thus proof of a massive spying operation targeting the Trump team.

Trump had been warned. Obama was serious when he told him not to bring on Flynn. The new president’s hand was forced, and the national security adviser left the White House on Feb. 13. Within the year, prosecutors from Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation threatened to charge Flynn’s son with lobbying violations if he didn’t plead guilty to making false statements to the FBI.

By then, Russiagate was in overdrive—one of the most destructive conspiracy theories in U.S. history was well on its way to poisoning minds around the country. It appeared to cast an even deeper spell on the elite urban classes whose peers in the press and government had fueled it in the name of “resisting” Trump. And yet only a small fraction of those who imagined themselves to have the inside story of the Trump team’s secret collusion with Russia to defeat Clinton understood the origins of the fantasy world they had been engulfed by.

Russiagate was not a hoax, as some conservative journalists call it. Rather, it was a purposeful extension of the Obama administration’s Iran Deal media campaign, and of the secret espionage operation targeting those opposed to Obama’s efforts to realign American interests with those of a terror state that embodies the most corrosive forms of anti-Semitism.

It’s not hard to see why the previous president went after Flynn: The retired general’s determination to undo the Iran Deal was grounded in his own experience in two Middle Eastern theaters of combat, where he saw how Iran murdered Americans and threatened American interests. But why Obama would choose the Islamic Republic as a partner and encourage tactics typically employed by third-world police states remain a mystery.